Twitter Search To Crawl Links & Add Ranking Algorithm

May 7, 2009 at 9:30am ET by Barry Schwartz

Cool changes coming to Twitter Search from News.com reports Twitter will be improving Twitter Search to index content beyond Twitter.com by crawling links within Twitter posts and also by adding a ranking algorithm to the search results.

In a one-to-one conversation with News.com’s Rafe Needleman and Twitter’s new VP of Operations, Santosh Jayaram – who was previously the VP of Search Quality for Google, Needleman uncovered some new and exciting features coming soon to Twitter.

Twitter Search is currently just a text matching search engine, it finds keywords based on the text of the most recent Tweet. Often, the search results can be repetitive or duplicate, plus not exactly a 100% relevant all the time. Jayaram hopes to change all that by taking Twitter Search beyond the current Twitter content and by looking at the pages people are linking to within their Tweets. A Twitter crawler will visit the links, index the page and then correlate that 3rd-party content with the Tweet itself. This should help make for more relevant Twitter search results.

In addition, Twitter hopes to build a ranking algorithm that not only takes into account relevancy, but also the current hot trends and reputation of the Twitter users. Jayaram said he didn’t know yet exactly how the algorithm will work, but it would include some method of user reputation along with the Twitter Trends and relevancy of the Tweets.


Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

See more articles by Barry Schwartz >

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